 "Photo: James Cavin")
"Men are idiots, but I like looking at them shirtless."
This is, presumably, the motto of the Lifetime Movie Network. For those of you unfamiliar with this degradation of Western Civilization, the LMN is a cable channel specializing in made-for-television movies catering to a female audience. And I don't mean the movies targeting girls in their early 20s, that feature chic yuppie protagonists played by androgynous Orlando Bloom clones and a title made up of some combination chocolate and flowers. No, this is television for a more mature audience. And by "mature" I mean your idea of a horror movie is your son dating the wrong girl.
Which is exactly what "The Wrong Girl" is about. The main character's son hooks up with "the wrong girl," who proceeds to break every known feminine social convention, including, but not limited to: getting your son to drink, smoking and staying out late, trying on your jewelry, criticizing your career choices, moving into your house, taking your daughter out shopping on your credit card, tasting stuff in the kitchen before you're done cooking it, dissing other people's makeup, breaking your food processor and less importantly; being a psychotic, jealous (biscuit-eater). Truly, the stuff of nightmares. Move over Steven King. For the record, she was a very attractive psychotic (biscuit-eater), but a psychotic (biscuit-eater) nonetheless. Of course, idiot son is completely incapable of noticing any of these warning signs, because I mean, he's male. What can you expect?
Anyhow, this all happens within the first 10 minutes of the movie, leaving the rest of the film for stuff like plot and character development. Unfortunately, "The Wrong Girl" could never really decide whether it wanted to be a horror movie for desperate 50-year-old housewives, or a porno for desperate 50-year-old housewives. So for every terrifying your-son-is-dating-a-psycho moment, there's an equal amount of time spent showing the son in varying degrees of sweaty shirtlessness. (Well, I just thought I'd play some basketball, and then this bottle of baby oil fell on me and I had to take my shirt off and then I realized that this basketball is super heavy so I had to start flexing all my muscles to pick it up.)
Well, the movie takes a turn for the dramatic when the idiot son turns up dead, and it was obviously Kelly the psycho (biscuit-eater) because, come on, she broke your food processor. The wench is capable of anything. All I have to say is Kelly could whack me over the head with an oar and dump my body in a lake anytime.
Anyway, I couldn't really empathize that much because as soon as the son character had come on screen I had wanted to kill him and dump his body in a lake. So I thought the movie was shaping up pretty nicely: there was already a kill-count and Kelly the attractive psychopath could appear minus all the sweaty male shirtlessness that had dominated the first part of the film. Unfortunately, mom isn't about to let things slide like that and sets out on an estrogen-fueled crusade to convict Kelly the attractive psychopath and alienate whatever shreds of a male audience were left.
The secondary characters do a good job of letting mom do all the work. The husband/father character was apparently lobotomized shortly before filming began and spends the entire time drooling on himself and making comments like "Well, I know she acts like a psychotic, murderous (biscuit-eater), but I really can't imagine Kelly being a psychotic, murderous (biscuit-eater)." About two-thirds of the way through he has a sudden epiphany and says (word for word) "Oh my goodness, I've been so blind. You were right" and spends the rest of the movie drooling on himself in a more supportive manner. In the Lifetime Movie Network universe, you can have either a Y chromosome or a brain, but not both.
This rule also applies to members of the police force, who are so inconceivably clueless that mom has to do her own investigation. Eventually her estrogen-fueled crusade uncovers enough evidence for a good old fashioned confrontation. All the male characters sense that this is a real girl-talk moment and stay home, drooling on themselves and watching "Cops" reruns (which is what I should have been doing).
So mom, wearing a wire, lures Kelly the attractive psychopath out to the scene of the crime, and there confronts her with a gigantic body of evidence that had never been mentioned before, like "police found a broken oar covered in idiot son's blood floating in the lake."
At this point, Kelly the attractive psychopath screams "you'll never take me alive." She and mom then break into a acrobatic, slow-motion oar fight across the dock as the lake slowly fills with sharks. Lightening flashes and a squadron of F-16's strafes the-
Well that's what happened in my head, because all that happened on screen is that Kelly the attractive psychopath blubbered some confession about how she accidentally killed idiot son for dumping her and then tries to run, at which point the male police officers wipe the drool off and jump out from their hiding place (where they've probably been watching "COPS" reruns on a portable TV) and grab her. Kelly the attractive psychopath gets drug kicking and screaming in an unladylike but still rather attractive manner into a police car, from whence she is presumably whisked off to the place for naughty attractive psychopaths. The movie ends with a few pointless minutes of everyone reflecting on what they learned, namely that men are dumber than dirt.
So I for one, demand an apology from Lifetime Movie Network for this terrible negative portrayal of the male gender as a bunch of blindly moronic couch potatoes with nothing better to do than spend their lives watching terrible television. Pass me something to wipe off this drool, will you?
James Cavin is a senior English major
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